Kate: Thank you for the lovely introduction and for the warm welcome.
This is my first ever CCC, so thank you all for a really warm welcome.
My name is Kate, and I direct a research program called the
Children's Online Safety and Privacy Research, or COSPR, program.
This project deals with this topic, which has been at the center of heated debates
from family dinner tables to morning talk shows and parliaments around the world.
From age assurance and the social media ban to client -side scanning, we see over and
over again how children's safety and adult privacy are pitted against each other.
As people continue to grapple with the question of how to regulate
tech and what kind of digital features we want to create for young
people, this puts us in an impasse with children's safety and adult
privacy on the other side, big tech accountability and tech apologism,
moral panic versus Trojan horse, doing something versus doing nothing.
And these binaries are not only inaccurate, but they paralyze
all of us from actually engaging with the complex social, moral,
political, and technological complexity that this topic holds.
And this community, as technologists, parents, social workers,
digital rights advocates, and all of us former children, have
a unique positionality that can get us past this impasse.
Because this community has been at the forefront of imagining and shaping
what a safe, secure, and collective digital futures might look like.
And to do that, we need to have a fundamental
reorientation in how we understand this problem area.
I feel particularly well positioned to take you on this journey.
I've spent the past 15 years of my experience in sexual violence, prevention, and
response in frontline work, community organizing and advocacy, research, and policy.
I, in fact, didn't really start out with an interest in tech,
but soon I had to because that's where the work took me.
And when I did, I was startled by how the divide between privacy
and safety came up again, again, and again, ultimately to the
detriment of the people who were impacted by sexual violence.
I started out on the front lines, providing direct support to
survivors, many of them young, of sexual violence and family violence,
first in the west and east coast of the US, and then in Seoul.
And there I saw how sexual violence is always systemic.
Capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy created the conditions
of migration, poverty, racism, and colorism, transphobia and
queerphobia, and disability, among others, where sexual violence
emerged as a weapon of control, extraction, and dehumanization.
As an organizer campaigning for survivors' rights, I saw how quick
the criminal legal system was to dismiss tech -facilitated harms.
Judges, lawyers, police officers, and social workers telling young
women and children that they shouldn't have put their information
out there, that if they're so worried they should learn how the
internet works, as if they do, or that they should just log off.
And most importantly, and most recently, I worked in Google's
child safety product policy team, where I was hoping to play a more
tangible role in safeguarding young people's digital experiences.
And instead, I saw how the tech industry's greed to feed its
surveillance business model took advantage of young people.
They claimed to care about privacy and safety, but it was a marketing
exercise at best, a compliance checkbox exercise, as a company set aside
truly innovative prevention ideas in favor of hyping up the AI bubble.
I share my journey with you with the hope that it gives you a glimpse into
what's at stake when we define this issue as one of safety and privacy.
There's so much more when we allow ourselves to think beyond the impasse.
So how did this impasse framing come about?
Policy agenda has been primarily expressed by the concern for young people's
mental health, but really, it's propelled and anchored by very particular ideas
about child sexual abuse, and in the online context, child sexual abuse materials.
So here, I think it's helpful to think about all of these laws kind of as a whole unit.
So this is a map of latest legislative moves in different
jurisdictions regarding children's online safety.
So Australia has been leading the way with the social media
minimum age restriction, which kicked off a few weeks ago.
And also paving the way is the UK's Online Safety Act, which implemented
age assurance methods this summer, and many of you have been tracking that.
The EU continues its heated debates around chat control.
I know Germany has had its own grappling with chat control
very recently, as the DSA and DMA continue to kick in.
And bolstered by what's happening in the EU, the US too is
revisiting children's online safety discussions with the Kids
Online Safety Act in the stacks for discussion in the next year.
And the momentum from Australia is making its way to the
Asian Pacific region, though there the focus has been on
cyber sex crimes, particularly around financial sextortion.
And similar regulatory momentum is making its ways to
the African continent with Nigeria's Online Harms Bill.
And countries like Uganda and Ghana with their anti -homosexuality
bills include substantive portion about online content moderation.
And receiving less attention are events in Latin America, particularly
in Brazil, which actually took a really innovative step forward
this year in introducing a data governance framework for children.
So when taken as a whole, these policies have three things in common.
First is a vague definition of child safety that conjures
a very strong mental model about child sexual abuse.
So as we saw, child safety encompasses a whole range of different issues.
We have grooming, child sexual abuse materials, sextortion,
scams, misinformation, radicalization, mental health, and so on.
And the fuzziness of child safety is what allows it to
encompass all of these very different social phenomenon.
And it also leaves a lot for interpretation.
So when you read the policy language closely, or listen to the politicians'
announcements and statements, it's really clear that they're constantly evoking
and conjuring child sexual abuse and child sexual abuse materials as the strongest
justification for why the internet needs to be regulated in this very protectionist way.
So child safety itself might be vague, but this vagueness
enables child sexual abuse to become a fixed mental model.
And harm is reduced to content.
Under this rhetoric, harm exists within the four corners of the content.
Harm exists purely online, isolated from the
complex interplay of online and offline factors.
We lose sight of how risks differ from harm, how toddlers and teenagers
are impacted differently, and how harm emerges from behaviors.
This singular focus on content has the effect of diluting
the motivations and incentives of the institutions and
people that take advantage of and mistreat young people.
Rather than addressing the root causes that create the predatory
environment, the goal then is to remove harm by removing
content through detection, reporting, and content removal.
And solutions are thus privatized and punitive.
It's no wonder that the proposed interventions are tech solutionist,
as we see with things like age assurance methods, client -side
scanning, reporting tools, grooming classifiers, you name them.
But more importantly, these measures are privatized and singularly focused on punishment.
They enable the tech industry to collect, consolidate, and
centralize more data about everyone's private and intimate lives
in the name of finding the bad guys who are hurting our children.
We end up assuming that catching the bad guys means that young people are being protected.
So these threads form what I call a child protectionist approach.
So this is an approach to safeguarding young people that collapses
meaningful differences in harms, motives, and impacts in order
to justify taking a blunt, universalized, law -and -order response.
Now, protection itself isn't inherently harmful, and it might even be necessary at times.
But this protectionist approach allows young people to be framed as frozen, as
helpless victims, rather than complex people whose needs change and evolve over time.
Safety is offered as a special carve -out for young
people, as if they exist in isolation from other people.
And risks and harms become one to warrant a blunt response that's more
concerned about catching the imaginary predator than supporting young people.
And protectionism has a way of taking over the discussion and pushing it to the extreme.
It does so because child sexual abuse, and in online context,
child sexual abuse materials, are fixed as a mental model.
And this jump happens because of what my colleague Elizabeth Clemants, who's
a long -time restorative justice practitioner for people impacted by child
sexual abuse, running this wonderful group called Hidden Water in New York.
She calls this jump the result of the ick factor of child sexual abuse.
So when child sexual abuse is evoked in a room, the room goes silent.
I've seen it so many times. Everyone freezes up and avoids eye contact.
People don't want to hear, think, or talk about it.
They get the ick, and they try to avoid engaging with it.
But a lot happens in the state of avoidance.
And it's imperative that we, as responsible adults who care deeply
about safeguarding young people in our lives and steering the internet
towards a more libertary future, to tackle this avoidance head on.
Before I go on, I want to quickly set some intentions with
you all because we're about to delve into heavier discussion.
So content warning, I'll be speaking comprehensively and candidly about
child sexual abuse, CSA, or child sexual abuse materials, or CSAM.
And I know that that can be a really difficult task for a lot of different reasons.
Maybe you're a concerned parent. Maybe you work in this area.
Maybe you've been impacted in some way.
Or maybe you're having a hard time getting past the ick.
So whatever the reason, I encourage you to engage with this on your own terms.
And that might look like stepping away, taking notes, or not taking notes.
For those of you calling in online, might mean
that you take a pause and come back to it later.
So whatever you do, that's all okay. You know your body, so follow your own pace.
And if you choose to continue, be curious.
There's a lot that we have to unlearn when it comes to this topic.
I'm 15 years in and still finding myself unlearning and learning.
So to do that kind of collective learning, relearning,
and unlearning, you have to let yourself be curious.
And curiosity happens when we allow ourselves to give each other and ourselves grace.
And finally, learning is never solitary. It's a group effort.
So I encourage you to check in with each other during and after the talk.
Maybe you're sitting next to someone you've never met before,
but maybe this is an opportunity for you to make new connections.
So in the spirit of group care, I want to invite you all, and this
is totally optional, to do some collective breaths together with me.
This helps us regulate so we can set aside whatever assumptions,
projections, and anxieties that we're bringing into this topic.
I like to do what's called a 3 -2 -4 breath.
So I'm going to invite you all to inhale with our noses in a count of three.
And then we're going to hold our breath for two.
And then we're going to exhale while I count to four.
So for those of you who want to, we can do this: so I'm going to inhale in three.
One, two, three, hold for two, and exhale, two, three, four.
Let's do it one more time.
Inhale, two, three, hold for two, exhale, two, three, four.
Thank you for doing that with me. So let's return to the ick.
Why do we get the ick?
This avoidance is a response to our shared imaginaries about child
sexual abuse, which mainly takes the shape in the figure of the predator.
This figure of the predator is almost always imagined as
an adult man with a pathological sexual interest in young
children and predisposed to seek them out and abuse them.
He goes by other names like sex offender, predator, pedophile, and groomer.
But contrary to what we associate with the figure of the predator in
our minds, the reality of child sexual abuse is much more complicated.
So by far, about 90 % of child sexual abuse or CSA involve people
who are known and trusted by the child and happens usually at home.
So this is something that happens within the family system.
And juvenile offending accounts for over two -thirds of CSA, meaning
that it's something that happens within a peer -to -peer context.
And the average age of difference is about six years and often can
involve older sibling or someone like an older sibling, like a cousin.
So I think many of us who have been working in this area are familiar
with the fact that it's something that happens within the family system.
However, the figure of the predator is so prevalent in our culture
so that even those of us who consider ourselves pretty informed,
the figure of the predator is so baked into our cultural fabric.
You know, from reality shows like To Catch a Predator, there's a new show on HBO Max,
for those of you who have it, with " It", the Pennywise, and a true crime podcast.
So it's so baked into our culture that it constantly sets
us back from actually confronting the realities of CSA.
And as a result, the ick masks systemic factors that enable
CSA in our own families, communities, and institutions.
It presents the story that CSA is this awful one -off incident.
But the truth is that it's something that happens throughout the life
course or that its effects unravel throughout the life course of a person.
So for 78 % of children who experience CSA, it happened more than once.
And for 42%, it happened more than six times.
It also happens always in tandem with other forms of child maltreatment.
In a study in Australia, four in 10 children experience
more than one type of abuse, such as neglect, physical
violence, emotional violence, exposure to domestic violence.
And it tends to involve [or] implicate people who
are already vulnerable, marginalized, and displaced.
So the likelihood and severity of CSA are linked to gender.
Girls are at a risk for most types of child maltreatment,
particularly for sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and neglect.
Although I do want to note that this might also be as a result of the
fact that we have historically overlooked the impact on young boys.
And this is a growing area of research.
Children with disabilities are three times more likely than
children without to experience CSA, and children in the foster care
system are more likely to have higher lifetime experiences of CSA.
And this isn't something that [... ] the figure of the predator
is not just inaccurate as we're seeing, but it actually
actively harms the children and adults who are impacted.
Delayed disclosure is really common for people impacted by CSA.
Disclosures can happen anywhere between a week after the incident to
46 years later, and 66 % of episodes are never disclosed to an adult.
So to recap, we've seen how a protectionist approach has come to prevail
in our regulatory and cultural and moral understanding of child safety, and
the ick factor of CSA is so powerful that it keeps us fixated on this figure
of the predator and diverts our attention away from the realities of CSA.
So how then has the ick factor shaped children's online safety?
Well, the story of protectionism and children's online safety in many ways is a
story of an ecosystem, one that is constantly reproducing itself and ever- expanding.
It's a story about this ecosystem premised on big, scary
numbers, one that's designed to chase those numbers,
and in doing so, cast real people aside in pursuit of what
those numbers mean, or in pursuit of what the numbers represent.
So we start with the big, scary numbers that shock us
and divert us away from the real child safety issue.
So when it comes to online safety, CSAM, child sexual abuse
materials, come to stand in for the figure of the predator.
So take this really commonly cited stat, you can see it in
policy documents and media discussions about CSAM from NCMEC,
or the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
And this is a US -based national clearinghouse for processing CSAM reports.
In 2023, NCMEC alleges that they received 36 .2 million
reports of suspected child sexual exploitation.
This is a jarring and horrifying number.
So we have this big, scary number about CSAM that conveys
this idea that the internet is inundated with CSAM.
Well, let's unpack this.
Because the internet is run by internet service providers, the ESPs are
under US federal obligation to report what they think might be CSAM.
So US federal law requires electronic service providers, or
ESP, to detect, report, and remove suspected child sexual
abuse materials to the cyber tip line, which is run by NCMEC.
And then that kind beckons a question of like, well, what exactly is a CSAM?
How do you know that it's suspected CSAM?
So when we interrogate it, we see that CSAM is a very particular legal object that's
rooted in a very American set of values, that's both over- and under- inclusive of
how child sexual abuse and exploitation might be captured as pieces of content.
So in this definition, we see that CSAM refers to any visual
depiction of sexually explicit conduct involving an apparent minor.
I want to highlight the three key components of this definition.
First is visual depiction.
And this is something that actually varies by jurisdiction.
Some jurisdictions include text -based material, audio, and so on.
But in the US definition, there's kind of an overemphasis on visual materials.
Sexually explicit conduct.
In the US definition, this really is defined by
the presence of genitalia and penetrative sex acts.
So we can see how a very particular heterosexual
notion of sexual violence is inscripted into the law.
And apparent minor. The word " apparent" is doing a lot of work.
So there's an assumption here that you can distinguish a child's body from an adult body.
So as a result of this really vague, both over- and under- inclusive definition,
the cyber tip line ends up including a whole lot of different things.
So first, it includes genuine child sexual abuse and exploitation materials.
So these are images and other types of content captured
during actual instances of abuse and exploitation.
But it also includes something like the baby bum on the beach.
So this is your grandma taking a picture of her naked grandson running around the beach.
So it might meet the legal definition of CSAM, but certainly isn't sexually motivated.
And it's innocuous by all means.
It also includes something like nudes, which the industry parlance is self -generated CSAM.
And it's older adolescents who are engaging in developmentally
normative behavior to capture and share intimate imagery.
It might be innocuous.
It might become harmful in the cases of non -consensual image circulation.
But of course, you wouldn't necessarily know that from just looking at the image.
It also includes reshares.
Another horrible industry parlance called "potential meme".
So this refers to people who are resharing CSAM that's
already been known and detected, either to raise awareness
about it or from a sense of outrage or to troll other people.
So various motivations there.
But the idea is that it's a reshare of what's already out there on the internet.
And it also includes obscene visual content.
So these are your animated content, things that are
generated to replicate the image of a real child.
So just from looking at all of this, we can see how CSAM really is a legal object
that's not necessarily, though can be, a proxy for hands -on abuse and exploitation.
So as a result, there's a great disparity in the actionability of cyber tips.
So of the 36 .2 [million] cyber tips in 2023, when we break it
down, law enforcement found 49 percent of that to be actionable.
This means that there was enough information with the report from
the ESPs that they were able to do something about the investigation.
And three percent of the total was referred to law enforcement.
And at the end of the day, 0 .18 percent of the total 36 million, so that's 63 ,892
cyber tips escalated for likely involving real hands -on abuse of a real child.
Now, I want to actually sit with this number because this is a harrowing number.
But I think it's important to note that this whole system is designed for this final number.
But then we see this great disparity between the 36 .2 million that
we started with and then the 63 ,000 tips that we ended up with.
So how did this actually happen?
How do we make sense of this gap in actionability?
Well, like we've been kind of circling around, to be able
to identify whether real abuse and exploitation happened,
sometimes a picture can be an encapsulation of that.
But most often than not, that context of harm
lives outside of the four corners of the content.
So to determine the presence of abuse, you need contextual information like
the presence or absence of consent and the nature of the harmful behavior.
So is it coercion, controlling behavior, threats, monitoring and surveillance,
deception, manipulation, non -consensual sharing, or exploitation.
Like I said, images between two teenagers going through puberty who are dating, they
might want to share intimate imagery, but the minute that one partner decides to
share that with other people non -consensually, that's become now a harmful behavior.
But the photo didn't change, right? It's the context surrounding it. Motivation.
Was it innocuous? We saw how, you know, people are sharing CSAM out of outrage.
So it can be something that's done innocuously or people who are curious
to egregious out of a desire for coercion or revenge,
or sexually motivated by the desire to humiliate
and coerce, or non -sexual, like in the case of
financial sextortion, where lots of scammers have
identified that sexual interest is a really good
way to lure the interest of young people and elderly
people because they're particularly susceptible to
interests like that. So it might take on a sexual
connotation, but the real motivation behind it is
financial. And relationality. So what's the age
difference between the people involved? What are
the power differentials? Is it an adult and a child?
Is it an older child and a younger child? Is it
a teacher and a student? And what's the nature of
the relationship between them? So when we put all
of this together, what we see is that rather than
referring to all of them as child sexual abuse or
exploitation material, really what we're talking
about is child sexual material. And I think it's
important to name it as such because that is what's
being captured under the guise that it might lead to
the sixty three thousand that we ended up with, but not necessarily.
So essentially, this creates this ecosystem that's designed to chase numbers.
And here is a map of the ecosystem. So at the very
top, we have the electronic service providers.
So these are your Googles and your Metas and your
Microsofts and also the telecos like Verizon.
And their compliance requirement is to design and apply proprietary detection technologies.
And the idea is that they would pass it over to
the law enforcement and regulators, whose job is to
investigate CSM tips for policing responses. And
we've seen increasingly how entities like the eSafety
Commissioner or Ofcom are playing an active role
in facilitating this process of communication and
compliance between the ESPs and law enforcement.
This has also led to the creation of lobbyists and
campaigner organizations. And their job is to raise awareness about CSM tip reporting.
And they work very closely with the clearing houses
and the tip lines. So these are often government
appointed charities that collect, review, and refer
CSM tips from ESPs and members of the public and
maintain a database of them. And this entire interaction between the actors has also led to
the growing, very lucrative marketplace of what I
call the tech solutions vendors. So these are third
party tech companies, often without substantive child
safety expertise, who are developing and selling
compliance technologies to sell to the other ecosystem
actors. So it might be an analyst review tooling
kit. It might be Intel research report and so on. So
the ecosystem that we're seeing here, it's constantly
reproducing itself and constantly expanding. And I'm
sitting in front of a room full of technologists,
so I don't have to tell you about the algorithmic
harms and how they compound as this ecosystem continues
to rely on detection. So these compounding harms of
automated mandated reporting, it works like a loop.
You're constantly caught in it, and sometimes it's
hard to even name and identify what kind of harms are
happening within. So like we said in the offline
context, a lot of child sexual abuse happens within
a peer -to -peer context, and that applies in the
online context as well. So 44 % of CSAM offenders are
under the age of 18, and 68 % of CSAM offenders are
known to the child. And with online commercial sexual
exploitation— so it means that there's some kind of a
monetary exchange involving CSAM —most, in fact, 92 %
are self -negotiated by the young people, with the primary motivation being money. So we see
that it's not a clear black and white picture of abuse
and exploitation that we are, you know, conjuring in
our mind, but rather a really complicated picture
that also implicates young people as well. And it
also has a disparate impact on people with neurodivergence. There's a lot of emphasis on how
young people with neurodivergence are likely to be
victimized, but they're also at a higher risk for
offending. Online offending disproportionately implicate
adolescents, particularly those with autism spectrum
disorder. There's also racial disparity as well. And this is in the context of broader child
protective services in the U .S., but I think we
can extrapolate from this. White and non -Latinx
children's cases of physical and sexual violence in
the U .S. are more likely to be substantiated than
black and Latinx children. This means that allegations
of sexual and physical violence from lighter- skinned
children are more likely to be believed than from
darker- skinned children. And this entire ecosystem,
of course, is something that's, you know, exported
at a global scale. So it's reproducing the digital
divide. And one way that we can see the impact of
that is through the, again, racial disparity in the
data set. And this is something that's known within
the ecosystem actors, although it's something that's
rarely mentioned. So while child sexual abuse itself
is universal across regions, cultures, countries,
CSM cyber tips mostly feature white children, and
arrested viewers are mostly white. Now, there are
many reasons for this. It might have to do with
internet connectivity. It might have to do with
jurisdictional compliance with their CSM reporting.
It might have to do with access to devices. It might
also have to do with how we racialize innocence
and how that might come through in these detection
ecosystems. We simply don't know, but there is, you
know, we can use this information to look into how
racial disparity from collection, processing to
investigations might come through. And this whole
system exists on hash matching technology, which is,
you know, developed to identify materials that have
already been vetted to be, you know, true positive
pieces of CSAM. But many victims of CSAM are actually
not aware that their imagery is being used to train
these models of detection. In a recent survey of 80
survivors of CSAM, 60 % were aware that their material
was retained by the police, 45 % knew that it was used by
tech companies, and 35 % knew that it was being used by
researchers. That leaves a whole lot of people who had
no idea that their images were being used to train
these models. And of course, 90 % of those interviews
said that they wanted to know. So when we kind of
take a step back and go back to the ecosystem map,
you'll also notice that this ecosystem is actually
missing a few key actors. And that's because this
ecosystem exists in separation from a much smaller
ecosystem, one that's been in existence for a lot
longer, and the one that is constantly shrinking
and chronically underfunded. It's the ecosystem
that's run by the frontline service providers.
So these are people who are directly interfacing
with young people to provide them with direct support.
These are your therapists, shelters, caseworkers,
and treatment programs. These are your helpline
operators. These are resources that exist to protect
your confidentiality and give you informal advice
and provide you with coping strategies and youth
serving organizations. So your guidance counselors
in schools, nurses, after- school programs, and so on.
And not only is this a smaller ecosystem, this
smaller ecosystem is constantly being pulled in by the
bigger ecosystem for things like funding and
opportunities for visibility. Now, you might ask that,
well, surely the detection ecosystem must exist for
a reason, that it must be doing something right.
Well, that depends on how we measure impact. And
that impact comes down to numbers versus people.
Many people don't know that the ecosystem map that
we saw in the previous slide are of two separate
ecosystems. So on one hand we have detection, and
on one hand we have prevention. And we're taught to
assume that they're one and the same. We think that
catching the bad guys means that we're providing
support to young people, but these are actually
very different projects. We assume that detection is
helping, and we assume that reporting is helping.
And that's simply not true. Too often the resource
provided to young people, like the one listed on the
major ESP's help center pages, is a link to hotlines.
And hotlines, like NCMEC cyber tip line, are used
for reporting illegal materials and operated by
people with mandated reporting obligations. This
is separate from helplines, warm lines, lifelines,
a bunch of different names that are used purposely
to distinguish them from hotlines, because they can
actually promise you some degree of privacy, anonymity,
and confidentiality, and offer you a range of skill sets.
So when people are subjected to mandated reporting,
it ends up doing more harm than good. It's really
difficult to get information about mandated
reporting in CSM context, so here I have a piece of
similar data that we can extrapolate from domestic
violence survivors, and a fair number of those surveyed
were also underage. So in a survey of 3 ,616 domestic
violence survivors and help seekers in the U .S.,
more than half said mandated reporting, which brought
in law enforcement intervention, made their situation
worse. So here we see 50 percent said that it made
it much worse, 12 percent said it made it a little
worse, 20 percent that it made no difference, 15 percent
that it got a little better, and 3 percent said much
better. So we see how mandated reporting, even though
it's a system that exists under the auspice that it
must be supporting survivors, is actually actively
detrimental to their help -seeking journeys.
And sometimes providers will share and disclose the fact that they actually can't
keep information confidential, and actually warnings about mandated reporting also reduce
the help -seeking ability. And when it comes to the
CSM context, people do seek help, but we're not
always there to provide them with the support that
they need. So in a recent research, 70 percent of
those who sought help in relation to their CSM viewing habits were not able to receive help.
And this is a real detriment, because help -seeking
is integral to child sexual abuse prevention,
both for the young people and the old people who
are sexually harmed, and the youth who have sexually
harmed others. But many mandated reporting requirements, stigma, and lack of resources
create systemic barriers. And in actual help -seeking
journey, privacy and safety are integral. Young
people, particularly young men, are more likely
to seek help from online services because they're
freely accessible, they're anonymous, and they're [more]
stigma reducing than the traditional opportunities.
And the people who are best positioned to do it
are youth workers. So these are the people in the
smaller ecosystem, and yet we currently live in a
time of severe austerity, particularly cuts to social
services. So we see the people with the most resources
and the skill sets and the training to be able to
play an active role in supporting young people's help -seeking journey, unable to do so.
So to recap, we've seen how the ick factor of big
scary numbers paves way for an ever -expanding and
self -reproducing ecosystem of CSM detection that's
designed to chase numbers and serve numbers over
people. So how do we break out of this loop of
detection and policing and punishment? We need a radical
paradigm shift. Instead of big scary numbers, we need to attend to lived stories of people
impacted by the detection ecosystem. We rarely hear
them, but they are out there. Instead of chasing
numbers, we need to nourish the help -seeking ecosystem. And instead of numbers over people,
we need to listen to the people, and we need to
support and care for all people impacted, overlooked,
and cast aside by this ecosystem that's powered by
tech and fueled by the carceral desire to punish.
And that's how we begin healing together, by investing in prevention. Prevention is a public
health concept about taking proactive measures to
avoid the onset, progression, and impact of child
sexual abuse online and offline. And this is how we get closer to enduring child safety.
So if we imagine our community as a tree, our
detection and punishment -driven approach to CSA
makes that tree look like this. It's a desiccated,
shriveling, and sharp tree. At the primary level of
prevention, which is for everybody to learn about child
sexual abuse, we do some work here, but we, for the
most part, keep people in a state of ignorance
and teach them individual practices like consent
education rather than creating environments that
are more conducive to a safer relationship. At the
secondary level, which is for people who are at a
higher risk of both offending and victimization,
we make it really difficult because, again, it's
the youth workers who are interfacing with young
people who are in the best position, but we are cutting funding and resources going to them.
At the tertiary level, which is to create conditions for offense and victimization -free
life, we do very little, again. Like we said, child
sexual abuse isn't something that just happens
once and then you forget about it. It's something
that happens and it's embedded into how we experience
systemic forms of violence. So people need ongoing
support, but we rarely offer chronic long -term resources.
And then quaternary prevention, which is really
the principle of "do no harm". And on this regard,
we do very little. And in fact, we actively don't
do quaternary prevention because we have things
like mandated reporting that continue to strip
resources from people. But what if we made different
choices? What if we can have a thriving, healthy, and
abundant tree with lush leaves and ripe fruits and
blooming flowers? Then we might have a prevention
tree that looks more like this. We provide people
with comprehensive sex and intimacy education.
We teach people about consent, both in offline,
relational contexts, and digital. We provide anonymous
and resource therapeutic support at the secondary
level. And we train youth -serving professionals
to identify healthy and harmful behaviors in young
people. At the tertiary level, we provide long
-term, non -stigmatizing resources at a local level.
And then at the quaternary level, we abolish things like mandated reporting. And instead,
we invest our resources into care and community
and prevention. Now, I've said a lot of this,
and these are great social policies that I think for
many of you here are great ideas, but lives a little
outside of the realm of control for you all. But
one of the reasons why I really wanted to have this
talk with this community is because I genuinely
think this community has a unique positionality.
So what can the CCC community do? Well, take safety
seriously to develop innovative help -seeking tools.
We saw that help -seeking is integral to prevention
and that privacy and anonymity and confidentiality are
integral. So what might that look like? What might
help -seeking tools that actually support young
people's journey look like? Also help shape regulatory paths with tech alternatives paired
with compelling messaging. You'll notice back in
the ecosystem map that, you know, technologists were
missing in the ecosystem map. And I think often it
is because technologists have sat on the sidelines
saying, you know, this is moral panic or this is Trojan
horse, going tsk -tsk, that can't be done, or that's not
the way to do it. Well, unfortunately, but also in an
opportunistic way, there's a lot of appetite right now to
see some kind of tech regulation. And we can't deny that.
There are aggrieved parents, teachers who are genuinely
concerned about how tech is impacting their young people, but
they don't necessarily understand tech. But I'm here in this room,
sitting in front of you all with the technical
expertise, you have the skills to translate what
technology means to other people. And that is an
incredible set of resources that you can harness
to shape the regulatory path in a more constructive
direction. And finally, through shared expertise,
build critical connections with frontline and child
rights groups. So these are people with resources
and expertise that can be partnering with you
all to think about what the messaging looks like,
to think about what those features look like. And you can do it in a skill- sharing manner,
you can offer to do, you know, data audit, you
can offer to do security audit and data literacy
trainings and so on. So it's a way to really
build and share expertise between the two groups.
So if you really want to break and resist the
carceral systems that are expanding, what we need are
critical connections. And these critical connections are not just strategically savvy—
it is how we build power, and it is how we enact
change, by showing those people who cannot imagine
a world outside of detection and policing, that
another way is possible, that there's another way
of being, another way of treating each other and being
in community with each other, and that another way of
world making is possible. And this isn't rocket science. In
fact, young people have been telling this to us all along.
So this is a research from Crisis Text Line, which is
a text -based mental health resource for young people
who are English and Spanish- speaking. And every year
they ask young people who've accessed their services,
what are the things that you wish that you had? So
they said that they wanted opportunities for social
connection, engagement in music, writing and arts,
mental health services, exercise and sports programming,
books and audio books, outdoor spaces and nature. And
you'll notice that there's technology implicated in
all of these. Every one of these require us to break
the impasse so we can think boldly and creatively
about how to bring together privacy and safety in
allowing young people to access these resources.
So as a final kind of wrap -up thought, I wanted to share this quote from Grace Lee Boggs,
who is an American feminist organizer and thinker.
She says, "Social change is never a question of
critical mass"— although critical mass would be nice
to have—" It's always about critical connections.
So I encourage you to break out of the impasse
framing and think about what critical connections
you have in your life to bridge this impasse together. Thank you.
Audience: [Applause]